Disney/Star Wars

So between trying to shoot a short video for the RPG I'm running, NaNoWriMo, getting some important paperwork in order (for money), and paying lots of money so my car doesn't kill me, I haven't been the best on blogs lately (And also Minecraft, but that's not important). Anyway, the "Disney buys Star Wars (and Willow, I guess)" thing has been bafflingly contentious.

While I did enjoy The Phantom Menace and have never been fashionable enough to love Jar-Jar Binks, I'll be the first the queue up some Mr. Plinkett Star Wars Reviews to watch the detailed, no-stone-unturned documentary revealing the prequels as a visually pleasing creation with fly-by-night fundamentals created with no artistic vision as a means to further get money out of a popular franchise.

Some would decry Disney as the same kind of heartless corporate machine that churns out material based on intellectual properties, only rocking itself off the couch to make new ideas when absolutely forced to. I'm not contending that Disney, as a corporation, is any kind of Star Wars fan, though I'm sure every executive in Burbank is spending this week telling everyone how Luke Skyrider and Hans Olo have been their biggest heroes since they were kids in the nineties. Disney doesn't care about the great "Star Wars things" that made folks love Episodes IV through VI. We're ten to twenty years past the creation of movies with those elements, because we aren't kids anymore and we can't experience...anything that way again. It's not without a tradeoff; how many of us would agree with our eight-year-old selves on how great Pulp Fiction is?

The alternative is letting Lucas keep it and while the current Clone Wars series is okay for kids, every other new endeavor by Lucas hasn't been popular with fans. It's shown the exact kind of crass commercialism that makes everyone over the age of twenty shudder whenever someone says the word "Disney" near their favorite, independent franchise. While Disney does crank out uninspired, workhorse sequels based on characters created by far more talented people for money, they do that shit damned well. The one glaring flaw of the Star Wars prequels was the difference between the audiences they aimed to put into seats and the audiences they truly affected. Disney movies (and because of my living situation, I've seen a number of them recently) remember they have a core audience, but they have found a balance between zeroing in on that core and maintaining some general appeal.

What I'm saying is that if any soulless corporation can make money off of Star Wars by creating a series of all-ages space fantasy films, it's Disney. If that's not what you want, go back to your novel collection and forget anything after 1998 ever happened.